MOST people regard the church as a place of refuge and where they can heal from their pain. However, one woman is claiming that her experience there was less than spiritual.

According to the woman, who said she grew up in church and whose identity
Jamaica Observer will not reveal, she was bombarded with sexual advances, actions she later found out were due to a bet placed to see who could take her virtue.

She recalled one experience of a father figure from her church embracing her, rubbing his erection against her private area. In another incident she said that a church brother, under the pretence of teaching her how to drive, attempted to rape her during a lesson, but she escaped.

“There were guys in the church who always tried to get involved with me. Some would say I am ‘holier than thou’, and it’s like everybody just aiming at this one girl because she is trying to keep a steady head and a straight walk — and I thought something was just wrong with that because shouldn’t they want to be pure and living this way too?” she reasoned.

She said she was 16 years old when she was approached by a church brother who extended his friendship. They would often share life experiences and struggles, counselling each other.

One day he approached her to follow him to a family member’s house. Despite being sceptical, she agreed. She said that after waiting alone outside in a dimly lit area for a while, she went inside where she found him alone.

“We had a struggle. He tried to have sexual intercourse with me and I fought for dear life as he cornered me,” she claimed.

Eventually she recalled him saying, “You likkle but you strong; mi a go affi leave you for your husband,” and released her.

She said the energy it took to fight him off left her weak, but she managed to run to a bathroom. When she had composed herself and opened the bathroom door he rushed in, held her down, and raped her, she told the Sunday Observer.

“In that moment of shock my hands dropped; I was just lifeless, I was weak, I was just not there,” she said.

“I wanted to die. He was taking something from me that was a prize to me, a prized possession, an experience I was looking forward to for the day of marriage. This is a little girl’s dream, and he took it and shattered it into a million pieces, and I didn’t know how to put it back together,” she said, adding that when she got home she fell to the ground in tears.

“I filled the bath with water and, as I took the garments off and I saw the blood, I crashed again and all I could think about was just taking my life in that tub because I was broken. I was broken in a way that was unexpected. I was broken in a way that I could not have imagined, and then I started blaming myself because if I had not gone with him this would not have happened,” the woman said.

She recalled feeling numb after the experience, one day placing her hand in a fire just to feel something, but she felt no pain.

Longing to feel clean again, she got baptised a second time. But she still felt dirty, she said.

The only person she told about it was a close friend, who gave her some support, but she said she chose not to report the matter to the police.

Reeling from experience, she fell into a life of promiscuity, thinking that since her virtue had been stolen, she was now worthless.

“There are more demons in the church than there are in the world — and it’s not to bash the church, it’s really just the experience of it because there are so many things happening that go unaddressed,” she said.

“Not everybody in the Church that says ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter heaven. Not because they are in the Church means that they are Christian; not because they are in the Church it means that they are saved; not because they are in theCchurch it means they are living a life worthy of the call to which we have been called — and I had to learn that,” she added.

The woman shared that it was not until she was much older and started working that she met a co-worker who knew her perpetrator. He later revealed that the man had taken her virginity as part of a bet he had made with other church friends.

“When he told me that and I realised that, basically, from the beginning I was set up, it broke me again,” she said.

“I would just cry out to God and I’m just like, ‘Lord, take this from me.’ There was this song, Imagine Me by Kirk Franklin that really ministered to my heart and I just really had to come into a place where I surrender the pain of the experience to God,” she told the Sunday Observer.

“In all of this and all the experience that I had, I came back to the core. I kept coming back to the centre of my focus, the centre of my life, which is Christ. He has been my anchor, so even though I’ve been going through these rough moments, these rough patches, making wrong decisions and all of these things, I keep coming back to Him,” she added.

She shared that she has forgiven the men who preyed on her and is now sharing her story with the hope of helping other victims to speak out.

“There is a silent, suffering community in the church community, and some women would have gone through a lot of things. The Lord would have said to me they’re a lot of persons who are going through what I have gone through, who don’t know how to deal with it, and there are those who have gone through it and still are not functioning well,” she said.

“I want them to know they can make it. There is help, and they don’t need to suffer alone and go through these experiences by themselves. Once we start to speak up about the things that are wrong we can start to experience the things that are right,” she stressed.